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by Jonathan Myerson?
Having covered almost every other American literary traditon with his blend of pastiche and surrealism, Brautigan now moves on to the mental and actual ramblings of a teenage American growing up in the 40s. This must be the ideal format for his style; previous novels have demanded apologies for those mental ramblings — whether the Babylon dreams of his private eye novel or the 186,000 endings for Confederate General. But no apology is required for this hero or his bizarre mixture of naivete and percipience.
So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away begins typically by giving us two confused images: that the narrator once shot somebody, and that he used to watch an elderly couple fish at a local pond. Nothing extraordinary were it not for the fact that the shooting could have been avoided by the purchase of a hamburger(?), or that the couple brings a living room suite (complete with sofa, lamps and stove) from which to fish(??).
The novel goes some way towards explaining these phenomena but they are really only pegs on which the (unnamed) narrator hangs his thoughts and memories. He leads us through fomative years spent watching early morning funerals emerge from the undertaker's next door, his miserable existence on welfare, and his History of The Hamburger Investigation, and so forth.
These recollections build up a relaxed picture of post-War America, of indidental characters and of that childlike ability to question everything and accept it all. As usual, there are unexplained oddities: why does the gas station owner pay for all the fishing worms with nothing but single cent pieces? What did the couple do with all the fish they caught? There are his unique and gloriously unpredictable descriptions of the ordinary: "I put my clothes on very quietly, like a mouse putting on a kleenex," or "Egyptian-mummy-wrapping beige." There is the same tendency to digression: on worm-accounting methodology or fading postcards on a night-watchmen's desk. As Brautigan has the hero admit: "I was a sneak, but the imagination was where I snuck around." Brautigan has been sneaking around the imaginations of American folk-heroes for years now and finally he has found the character with the most suitable and most fertile wanderlust.
This delightful, gentle novel evokes memories almost, but not quite, out of reach. And what is it that must not be "blown away"? "Dust ... American ... Dust" — whose very memories and images of a different lifestyle, a childhood: "A fairy tale before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity." So speaks the narrator, thirty years after the events described, but it is also Brautigan speaking. Brautigan is the Fantasist, regretfully summing up his childhood and his America.
Books & Bookmen?
August 1983: 35.
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